When developing complex or large-scale systems, the various components of the system are often assigned to different teams within a company (or even across multiple companies). Advantageously, a company can best utilize its resources by allowing each team to focus on a particular aspect of the system. The teams can become “experts” in their respective components, and need not worry about how the other components are implemented. For example, the system can be designed with various interfaces between the system components (e.g., where the interface is applicable at both the software and hardware level). The interfaces allow each system component (e.g., Ethernet card, software component, etc.) to function independently while using the interfaces to communicate with other system components.
However, it is not unusual for a team that designed one component to not know (or understand) how the remaining components function internally. Therefore, while each team may create custom log files or debug tools for their corresponding component, the other teams similarly create separate log files and debug tools specifically intended for use with the remaining components. Due to this disconnect between log files and debug tools, it can be difficult to collate data among the system components. For example, it may be difficult to collate data in the various system log files because they may be created by different components and/or contain different data entries. As a result, it can be difficult to determine the overall health or status of the system.
In many system deployments, it is important for the system to have full access to its available resources (e.g., processors, memory, data storage, etc.). Therefore, any additional processing, such as extraneous software modules, may unnecessarily consume too much of the available system resources. This can cause the system performance to decrease. For example, while it is desirable to execute health monitoring software in deployed systems (e.g., those actually being used by customers), it is often impractical to do so because it causes the system performance to decrease.